


like eating glass

by but_seriously



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/F, M/M, tumblr askbox fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-22
Updated: 2014-05-22
Packaged: 2018-01-26 02:34:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1671542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/but_seriously/pseuds/but_seriously
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Katerina comes to him, hair soft and clean, dress trailing about her ankles, smiling, satiated. She never comes to him wild and furious and hungry. No, she has Klaus for that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like eating glass

**Author's Note:**

> written for trinocence's prompt: **"a portrait of the artist as a young man" by james joyce** \+ _[…] and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour._
> 
> original post [here](http://highgaarden.tumblr.com/post/86130078912/librarian-103).

She puts flowers in her hair.

At night he dreams of pricking his every finger on the thorns she weaves into her tangled locks, dreams of blood dripping down her hair, sweeping over her shoulders in a heavy, sodden mess.

He dreams of her blood in his mouth, her fingers entwined in his: he wakes up with a chill creeping into the room and the curtains still swaying with her exit.

 

 

It is Niklaus she is transfixed with, Niklaus and his tales of tavern brawls and the raiding of tombs; he claps his hands and the air around them is clouded with dust, or gold, or both. There is not much difference to him. They didn’t matter.

What mattered, Elijah had come to learn in the five hundred years or so spent hovering just on the edges of his brother’s stratosphere, was the blood. It oozed, it pooled, and one day he sees Katerina drenched in it. Smiling, laughing, twirling, as if she might be dancing barefoot in the rain.

Niklaus catches his eye, Niklaus grins. There is blood in the cracks of his teeth, he doesn’t want to know whose blood it was. Niklaus catches his eye, Niklaus smiles, and Niklaus says -

"Is it not a glorious day to die?"

And between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour.

 

 

It’s a dagger.

But he won’t find that out until much, much later.

 

 

Katerina comes to him, hair soft and clean, dress trailing about her ankles, smiling, satiated. She never comes to him wild and furious and hungry. No, she has Klaus for that.

She puts flowers in her hair.

He asks, “Would you rather a crown instead?”

She says, _no_. She has no want for crowns, for jewels, for wine nor blood.

He wants to brush her hair from her cheeks, want to smooth the crease between her brows with a quick, stolen kiss.

He won’t. His bones creak, his skin hums, but his restraint - it is drawn, quartered in the sum of his parts, he perspires with it. He won’t touch her, he raises his eyes, he studies her face. “What _do_ you want, then?”

Katerina just looks wistful.

 

 

He thinks, in the way one does, that he might love her. Blood or no blood, nettles or gold, barefoot with mud between her toes or sweaty and writhing in Niklaus’ arms—it didn’t matter when he might love her.

But she is to die.

This is the story of an undead man loving a premature corpse, he writes with cynical amusement. He writes to Rebekah, when Klaus might wake her again one day. He writes to remember.

(Or he writes to forget. This is his story, his version of the truth, and in this story he does not want to remember how every moan elicited by his brother’s hands on her skin feels like drowning, how the trail of blood dripping down his brother’s chin drives him mad with want, with lust, with a war he did not know he had in him. Simply, he just writes.)

He strokes his sister’s hair, slides the envelope between her stiff fingers.

Closes the casket.

 

 

In the end, no one ever remembers the details of it. Niklaus finds the letters and shreds them; Katerina runs, and he is left with a story untold.

Just that.


End file.
